Kennan and Atomic War
WOLFE, BERTRAM D.
Kennan and Atomic War Russia, the Atom and the West. Reviewed by Bertram D. Wolfe By George F. Kennan. Author, "Three Whom Made a Revolution,'Harper. 116 pp. $2.50. Khrushchev and Stalin's...
...Other virtues of this series of talks lie in their vivid presentation of the Kremlin mentality...
...Our contest with the Soviet Union is not a tug-of-war in which every inch of progress they make is a loss to us...
...In any case: No contest—we produce more than enough already...
...Forgetting that the Hungarian uprising turned out as it did because England and France, on the one hand, and the United States, on the other, were at loggerheads on the invasion of Egypt, he "fervently prays" that there be no more such struggles for freedom...
...This, says Acheson with a polite qualifier, is an "almost Messianic statement...
...We do not have to go into paroxysms of jitters because they shoot a tiny moon into space a little ahead or a little heavier than ours...
...But actually, the good South wind blows through many of its pages, and these are rich with insights and formulations from which both policy-makers and public opinion might profit...
...you will find here no adequate nucleus of a puppet regime . your stay among us will not be a happy one...
...Or when some raw new nation tries to blackmail us into giving more funds and arms than they can properly use, with the threat that otherwise they will "go Communist," there are times when we might have the dignity to spell out a reply which says: "Try it...
...But if Kennan is irreplaceable as an expert and an adviser, it is a little frightening to contemplate the oft-repeated rumor (fortunately denied by both Adlai Stevenson and Dean Acheson) that George Kennan was slated to be the next Secretary of State if the Democrats were to win the Presidency...
...And, being consistent in his errors as in his virtues, he proposes, though he does not call it that, our return to isolationism in the form of our withdrawal from Europe...
...To say it, you do not need the physical presence of a President...
...He thinks it...
...If you dispense thus with modern arms and armies, if you dispense with the aid of NATO and America, if you thus scale down your own defenses and depend upon this total virtue and this awesome deterrent incantation, then: "I think I can give personal assurance that any country which is in a position to say this to Moscow, not in so many words but in that language of military posture and political behavior which the Russian Communists understand best of all, will have little need of foreign garrisons to assure it immunity from Soviet attack...
...There is only one sort of thing that can be usefully said to them and that is: what we would be prepared to do and what we would not be prepared to do in specific contingencies...
...Kennan's old chief, Dean Acheson...
...He believes that the ground forces of NATO should not be strengthened by adding the manpower of Germany...
...In the face of the record, he counsels our withdrawal from Germany...
...in the criticism of over-militarization in our own thinking...
...Kennan would have us by-pass NATO because, alas, we do not always see eye-to-eye with our allies...
...nor give massive publicity to each repetition of their stale propaganda slogans on the pretense that, because it is Khrushchev that has said it, (for the twentieth time), therefore it is front-page news...
...When we declared Korea outside our defense perimeter, it was invaded...
...It may be bad for us and for freedom, but it will be worse for you...
...It was not the virtues of his book but the fantasies which, for a little while, made Kennan's name something to conjure with in those anti-American circles in Europe which are the symmetrical opposites of our own isolationists...
...The best example of this sense of dignity which informs the Reith Lectures is to be found in the remarks on a summit conference: "In the face of this situation, I wonder about the wisdom of engaging the persons of the senior Western statesmen directly in the process of negotiation with the Soviet Government...
...He forgets that at the war's end we tried disarming and withdrawing from Europe, and that the Kremlin's answer to the power vacuum we left was the seizure of the captive nations...
...Forgetting the terrible patience of Poland for over 150 years of subjection, he anticipates that "the taste or even the hope for independence once [it] dies out in the hearts of these peoples, there will be no recovering it...
...As a result, his lectures attracted enormous attention, especially for the dangerous and wrongheaded passages in them...
...Informed, thoughtful, original, possessing a remarkable command of our language both in speech and writing and endowed with an instinctive humility in the expression of his opinions...
...This remarkable state of absolute purity and health, which history (and modesty) should tell him was never attained by any nation, would enable the mythical Graustarkias, protected only by a modestly armed domestic police and militia, to say to the men in the Kremlin with their plans to conquer the world for their system and their 175 divisions and their atom bombs and their missiles: "Look here, you may be able to overrun us, if you are unwise enough to attempt it, but you will have a small profit from it...
...In Asia, too, he closes his eyes to the aims of Soviet "aid" (to make trouble, to infiltrate, to subjugate), and urges that we must insist on "the Russians shouldering their part of the responsibility all industrialized nations bear for giving aid and guidance to the underdeveloped ones...
...less appalling" if the whole of Eastern Europe "adjusts itself" to enslavement in "the form of general despair, apathy, demoralization, and the deepest disillusionment with the West...
...He believes that Germany (or any great power) could be kept permanently neutral as if it were a Switzerland or a truncated Austria...
...nor make silly gestures towards prohibiting freedom of movement and travel in "retaliation" for their universal fixity...
...At this point words fail me, and I give the floor to Mr...
...On what does the guarantee rest, unless Divine revelation...
...As a Russian expert, he can so close his mind to the nature of the power politics practiced by the men in the Kremlin as to believe that power vacuums will not tempt them...
...those jointly occupied, with one exception (Austria), were partitioned by Moscow...
...troubled by his own and his country's failings...
...The man who is truly expert on Communist thought can solemnly advise us to write off satellite aspirations just before Hungary revolts and Poland strains at its chains...
...In the face of this record, Kennan thinks we cannot know what would happen until we try withdrawing again from Europe...
...The men in the Kremlin know their history better, for it was they who helped "disarmed" and "neutralized" Germany to evade the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles...
...Was there ever a land so soaked in virtue that no malcontents, schemers, alienated spirits, venial or ambitious puppets could be found to climb on the juggernaut of overwhelming power...
...For a historian, Kennan is singularly oblivious to the lessons of recent as well as less recent history...
...When the Wind Blows North-Northwest: But when the wind blows North-Northwest through the pages of this book, the suggestions can be quite mad—or at any rate, we would be mad to accept them...
...For that reason I thought it a shame when the present Secretary of State, for reasons that will not stand up to serious scrutiny, deprived himself and the Department of the original thinking and insights of one so well equipped...
...Surely, if the usefulness of these senior figures is to be protected and the raising of false hopes avoided, such meetings should occur if at all at the end of a negotiating process, and for the purpose of formalizing agreements already arrived at, rather than at the beginning and as a means of starting the wearisome process of accommodation...
...When Khrushchev announces that he will drive his agrarian serfs into producing more butter, meat and grain than the United States, we should have sense enough to say: "Good luck...
...He would have us enter into bilateral secret negotiations with the Kremlin...
...There were three classes of occupied countries: those exclusively occupied by the Soviet Army were dragged behind the Iron Curtain...
...in an awareness that the men in the Kremlin have no intention, if they can help it, of risking all-out war or permitting all-out peace, and are "not genuinely suspicious of our intentions": and in the persistent emphasis upon the fact that our chief task is to build and strengthen and improve our own society in accord with its own rationale...
...If the armed forces of the United States and Britain were not present on the Continent," he writes, "the problem of defense for the Continental nations would be primarily one of the internal health and discipline of the respective national societies, and of the manner in which they were organized to prevent the conquest and subjugation of their national life by unscrupulous and foreign-inspired minorities in their midst...
...The same Kennan who wrote the "Mr, X" article on "containment" would have opposed the Truman Doctrine on Turkey: the man who knows so much about Russia can write insensitively that the Ukraine is no different economically in relation to the Soviet Union than Pennsylvania to the United States...
...Once more, Kennan would appear to have read history in vain and contemplated men's weaknesses unseeingly...
...Chief of these is a sense of dignity...
...The present slender volume, with its large insights and its larger boners, proves once more the justice of the remark that on several occasions I have felt impelled to make: "Kennan is but mad north-northwest: When the wind is southerly, he knows a hawk from a handsaw...
...We hope you mean it...
...How can any man speak of a "personal assurance' to any such effect...
...Here is a good historian who forgets to look at history, and a good humanitarian who fails to look into the hearts of men...
...armed with deep and authoritative knowledge in the field of Russian history and culture and the habits of mind that spring from Communist dogma—he would seem to be an ideal adviser to our government at a time when our relations with the Soviet Union are at the very center of international life...
...With the wind thus blowing through interstellar space, we must end our review of George Kennan's talks to the nations on Russia, the Atom and the West...
...nor do we have to imitate their one-sided materialist worship of technology to turn all our universities into technical schools...
...we are in a position to assure that not a single Communist or other person likely to perform your political business will be available to you for this purpose...
...Prime Minister Macmillan, Hugh Gaitskell, Chancellor Adenauer, Erich Ollenhauer, President Eisenhower and other statesmen and would-be statesmen would do well to paste these words in their hats...
...As for the European nations which survive today only because of the timely support of the United States, even as South Korea survives only for the same reason, Kennan has a "reassuring word" to say to them...
...Adviser is one thing: policymaker, with fateful decisions in one's hands, quite another...
...The Southerly Wind: His latest book is a slight enlargement of the celebrated Rexth Lectures, delivered over BBC at a moment when the European world was suffering its first acute attack of sputnik jitters...
...While Kennan deeply means his homilies to virtue, he will be surprised indeed to find what characters will celebrate, without the virtues, his summons to a new and more dangerous isolationism...
...But by this time, the wind is blowing neither East nor West but, as the old children's game has it, "into the cuckoo's nest...
...With people whose state of mind I have just described no intimacy of understanding is really possible...
...the one occupied only by us, Japan, is free...
...Khrushchev and Stalin's Ghost" George Kennan is one of the most attractive of persons...
...Thus Mr...
...For Kennan can be alternately more profoundly right and more egregiously wrong than any other expert in the field of foreign policy...
...It is a contest for the defense of a much freer way of life and of such freedom as exists in the world...
Vol. 41 • May 1958 • No. 20
